The Alchemist’s Tale

Harry Potter & the Alchemical Tradition in English Literature

by John Granger

In her Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling looks at the world diagonally
and sees its magic. I believe this diagonal vision springs from her classical
education and its ideas of truth, love, and beauty, and her consequent discomfort
with modernity and with modern ideas and institutions. She conveys the world’s
magic as a traditional English writer writing within the traditions of her genre.
And one of these traditions is the use of alchemical symbolism to convey spiritual
realities.

We think of symbolism, after being trained by mechanical teachers and lifeless
texts, as cardboard signs saying, “this represents that.” “The
white whale is a symbol for God, Mrs. Johnson,” we all learned to say
in tenth-grade English. An authentic symbol, however, is a means of passage
and of grace between the shadow-world of time and space in which we live and
what is real. As Martin Lings, a student and friend of C. S. Lewis’s,
wrote in his book on mysticism and alchemy in Shakespeare’s plays:

Symbolism is not arbitrary, but is based on the very nature of things, on
the make-up of the universe. According to all cosmological and metaphysical
doctrines, whether Eastern or Western, earthly phenomena are nothing other
than the shadows or reflections of spiritual realities. The symbolism of a
thing is its power to recall its higher reality, in the same way that a reflection
or shadow can give us a fleeting glimpse of the object that casts it; and
the best symbols—the only ones worthy to be used in sacred art—are
those things which are most perfect of their kind, for they are the clearest
reflections, the sharpest shadows, of the higher reality which is their archetype.1

The reason many of the great authors of the English tradition used alchemical
symbols—Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Blake, Joyce, and Lewis,
for example—is that they are what Lings calls “the best symbols,”
“the clearest reflections . . . of the higher reality.”2
These symbols do the job literature and drama set out to do.

Understanding the Harry Potter books as alchemical writing in the
tradition of the English “Greats” will explain otherwise bizarre
events, plot turns, and names in the novels. It will also help explain the worldwide
popularity of these books (because they speak to deep spiritual desires), in
what way Christian objections to them are ironic (because they miss Rowling’s
point), and why the almost uniform approach of scholars to the books as cultural
artifacts to be dissected is a typically modern mistake (ditto).

So I have three tasks. First, I briefly explain what alchemy is and what it
isn’t, then explain why its imagery is so fit to express spiritual themes
and meanings, and last, explain how Rowling uses alchemy in the Harry Potter
novels. Readers should know that the following will give away some of the plot
and requires a little knowledge of the five books published so far, though no
more than someone who has never read the books will have gathered from all the
news stories about them.

What Alchemy Is

What modern people know of alchemy in my experience is almost inevitably wrong,
so wrong that the use of alchemical imagery in English literature must seem
absurd. One of the first things you learn in chemistry classes is that chemistry
grew out of a kind of medieval voodoo called alchemy, a pseu-doscience whose
goal was to try to isolate a philosopher’s stone that could turn lead
(meaning base metals) into gold and bestow immortality on the alchemist.

This is still the predominant idea of alchemy in the popular mind: “Alchemy
is stupid chemistry.” The second misconception about alchemy is that it
was a fraud or quackery; the third is that it is a kind of witchcraft; and the
fourth, coming to us from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is that it presents the
archetypes in the collective consciousness of humanity and the dreams of individuals.3

If alchemy wasn’t “chemistry for idiots,” a con game, witchcraft,
or a path into the unconscious mind, what was it? In its best and most representative
form, it was a spiritual path to return fallen man to his Edenic perfection.
(The history of alchemy is a complicated one, with its share of quacks, frauds,
and lunatics, but I am referring to the sort of alchemy the English Greats used
in their writings. Alchemies were also to be found in Jewish and Islamic areas
as well as Christian ones.4)

To understand how a science of metallurgy and physical bodies could advance
the purification and perfection of the alchemist, body and soul, requires turning
the modern worldview upside down. The alchemist, like all traditional or non-modern
people, understood man to be essentially spirit (as man is created by the Spirit),
then soul, then physical body, rather than the reverse. He believed the obvious,
i.e., that the lesser thing comes from the greater thing, never the greater
from the lesser.5

His personhood or humanity he knew to be a joining of soul and body without
seam—and his tragedy was that he was fallen, i.e., that he had lost his
spiritual capacity or intellectus, by means of which Adam walked and
talked with God in the garden. Alchemy was the means, in conjunction with the
mysteries of the Church, by which he could regain this lost capacity. The substance
changing from lead to gold was his soul, and the riches he would glean were
spiritual riches—holiness and immortality. (Gold was considered the most
perfect of metals, not just for its beauty but also because it did not rust
or tarnish.)

The alchemist was helped in doing this by effecting a similar change in metals.
Because the traditional worldview does not hold that there is a chasm between
subject and object, that is, that objects do not have independent existence
from their observers and vice versa, an alchemist understood the substances
with which he worked as being related to him. This relationship amounted to
a correspondence; as he purified himself in obedience to the work, the work
would advance and his soul or bodily consciousness would go through corresponding
changes.

This was not magic or work independent of nature, but an accelerating of the
natural work by observance of supernatural, even contra-natural principles.
Titus Burckhardt, who with Mircea Eliade is the authority on the history and
meaning of alchemy, called alchemy

the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this I am not seeking
to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such
as the purification and alloying of metals; their real work, however, for
which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or “operational”
symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists
on this point is unanimous.6

The Great Work

Alchemy is summed up in the adage, “To make of the body a spirit and of
the spirit a body,” as Burckhardt noted elsewhere:

Gold itself, which outwardly represents the fruit of the work, appears as
an opaque body become luminous, or as a light become solid. Transposed into
the human and spiritual order, gold is bodily consciousness transmuted into
spirit or spirit fixed in the body. . . . This transmutation
of spirit into body and of body into spirit is to be found in a more or less
direct and obvious manner in every method of spiritual realization; alchemy,
however, has made of it its principal theme, in conformity with the metallurgical
symbolism that is based on the possibility of changing the state of aggregation
of a body.7

As metals changed from rough ores and solid states to more and more pure conditions
by change of states (from solid to liquid and gas and back again to solid, a
process repeated several times) and by combination with catalysts and purifying
agents, the alchemist affected changes in himself by corresponding changes in
his bodily consciousness while attempting the work.

The Western alchemist by attempting to “kill” the ingredients,
to reduce them to the materia prima, provokes a sympatheia
between the “pathetic situations” of the substance and his innermost
being. In other words, he realizes, as it were, some initiatory experiences
which, as the course of the opus proceeds, forge for him a new personality,
comparable to the one which is achieved after successfully undergoing the
ordeals of initiation.8

In other words, alchemy had a soteriological role for the alchemist.9
It is essentially a super-conscious or spiritual work that happens through correspondence
with archetypes that are above, not below, individual consciousness.10

So what was alchemy? It was a traditional or sacred science, supporting the
work of the revealed tradition and its means of grace, for the purification
and perfection of the alchemist’s soul in correspondence with the metallurgical
perfection of a base metal into gold. It requires a view of man and of creation
or cosmology that is opposite and contradictory to that of the physical scientist
and chemist of today, for whom alchemists had only disdain; they thought of
men who were interested in matter only for its manipulation as “charcoal
burners” and anything but wise. To an alchemist, the chemist neglects
the greater thing in the lesser thing—and in himself.

This science went into precipitous decline and corruption at the end of the
Renaissance and especially at the Enlightenment, when it was eclipsed by the
materialist view and priorities of modern chemistry. But it was kept alive by
writers who found in its imagery and symbolism a powerful way of communicating
Christian truth.

Literary Alchemy

If English Literature from its beginning to Rowling is front-loaded with alchemical
devices and images, why is this so? What is the connection between alchemy and
literature that makes these images such useful tools for writers?

I think the connection is probably most clear in drama. Eliade even suggested
that alchemical work grew out of the initiatory dramas of the Greek Mystery
religions.11 Shakespeare doesn’t just make asides to alchemy
in his plays; many if not most of them are written on alchemical skeletons and
themes. The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen
of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, and The
Merchant of Venice come to mind.12 Frances Yates’s The
Art of Memory argued persuasively that Shakespeare built the Globe Theatre
on alchemical principles for the proper staging of his alchemical dramas.13
Why?

If you recall your Aristotle on what happens in a proper tragedy, the audience
identifies with the hero in his agony and shares in his passion. This identification
and shared passion is effectively the same as the experience of the event; the
audience experiences katharsis or “purification” in correspondence
with the actors. Shakespeare and Jonson, among others, used alchemical imagery
and themes because they understood that the work of the theater in human transformation
was parallel if not identical to the work of alchemy in that same transformation.
The alchemical work was claimed to be greater than an imaginative experience
in the theater, but the idea of purification by identification or correspondence
with an object and its transformations was the same in both.

Alchemical language and themes are a shorthand. The success of an artist following
this tradition is measured by the edification of his audience. By means of traditional
methods and symbols, the alchemical artist offers our souls delight and dramatic
release through archetypal and purifying experiences.

That may be harder for some of us than the idea of alchemy as a sacred science.
If you are like me, you grew up with the idea that reading was entertainment
and diversion, and anything but life-changing. This idea, really only in currency
for the last seventy or eighty years, is a gross misconception. Anthropologists,
historians of religion, and professors of literature will tell you that the
rule in traditional cultures, and even in profane cultures such as ours, is
that Story, in whatever form, instructs and initiates.

In his The Sacred and The Profane, Eliade argued that entertainments
serve a religious function, especially in a profane culture. They remove us
from our ego-bound consciousness for an experience or immersion in another world.
C. S. Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost, asserted that this
is the traditional understanding of the best writers, namely, that their role
in culture is “to instruct while delighting.”

Alchemy and literature are a match because they both endeavor (in their undegenerate
or orthodox state) to transform the human person.

Rowling’s Alchemy

Now to the third matter: how does Rowling use alchemical symbolism in her books?
To answer this question, two other questions must be answered: (1) Is she intentionally
using alchemical imagery? (2) How does understanding the alchemical themes and
images of the series improve our understanding of the books and their power
to charm and delight young and old around the world?

To the first question. Although Rowling has not said that she is writing in
the alchemical tradition of English literature, she has insisted that
she is a Christian and that her faith is important in understanding her work.14
If the author has not said that alchemy is at least part of the Harry Potter
books, how can we know if it is or isn’t? I suggest the following tests:

1. The evidence should be fairly clear (which is to say, the author should give
fairly obvious hints).

2. The books should show both a design akin and parallel to the stages of the
alchemical work and a bevy of imagery and symbols that are taken from this same
work.

3. This evidence should not have another as likely or believable explanation
from traditional or conventional literature.

Test one: Is the evidence fairly clear? I think it is. Here are three pieces
of evidence: the direct references to alchemy in two of the titles, the alchemical
characters as revealed by their names, and Harry’s alchemical transformations.

First, the book titles. The title of the first book is Harry Potter and
the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Sorcerer’s Stone
by the American publisher). And Warner Bros. has reserved the title Harry
Potter and the Alchemist’s Cell for the sixth or seventh novel.

Second, the alchemical characters. We learn early in the first book that Hogwarts’s
headmaster and Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore is an alchemist of some
renown, even a partner of the famous alchemist Nicolas Flamel, which distinction
(listed on his chocolate frog trading card) he treasures above all his titles.
(Flamel was a real and famous alchemist who lived in fourteenth-century Paris.)

Hermione Granger’s name has an especially obvious alchemical reference
in it, as do several of the names in the books. “Hermione” is the
feminine form of “Hermes,” who, besides being the Greek messenger
god (Mercury), was also the name of the great alchemist Hermes Trismegistos,
in whose name countless alchemical works were written through the centuries.
Harry’s father is named James, the name of the patron saint of alchemists,
and his mother is named Lily, a symbol for the second, purifying stage of the
alchemical work.15

Third, Harry’s transformations from lead to gold: The alchemical work
is about changing the soul from lead to gold, from failing to virtue; is this
evident in the title character’s transformations in each book? Yes, it
is.

In the first, Philosopher’s Stone, the orphaned Harry lives
in fear of his aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, and without any knowledge or delight
in who he is. By book’s end, he shows himself a champion of remarkable
courage and daring, and has become reconciled both to his parents’ deaths
at the hands of the sorcerer Voldemort and to his own destiny as a wizard. In
Chamber of Secrets, Harry begins the book as a prisoner both of the
Dursleys and of his own self-doubts and self-pity. At the heroic finish, he
risks his own life to liberate a young girl and vanquish the villain, who is
an incarnation of selfishness and self-importance.

Harry blows up his Aunt Marge because he cannot overlook her slights of his
parents at the beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban. At the end, he rescues
the man who betrayed his parents to Voldemort by offering his own life as a
shield to him. He goes from unforgiving judgment to mercy in a year. In the
fourth book, Goblet of Fire, Harry begins by being consumed by thoughts
of what others think of him, his external person. By book’s end, after
trials with his best friend, the Hogwarts student body, and a dragon, he is
able to shrug off a front-page hatchet job in the wizarding world’s main
newspaper.

Finally, in Order of the Phoenix, Harry is consumed by a desire for
news. He struggles to listen to television, agonizes over the lack of reports
from friends, and wanders his neighborhood in search of newspapers in trashcans.
At the end, he is aware of his need to turn inward and to discover and strengthen
his inner life, and he knows that his dependence on the outer world and its
events was his point of vulnerability, by which Voldemort manipulated him, and
of the weakness that helped cause his godfather’s death.

Alchemical Design

So Rowling seems to have given the reader lots of obvious hints that the books
use alchemical symbols. This takes us to test two: Are both the design and predominant
imagery of the books alchemical? They are.

First, the design. Let me give three examples. The first is the analogy of the
roles of sulfur and mercury in alchemy with the roles of Harry’s friends
Ron and Hermione in the books. The alchemical work purifies a base metal by
dissolving and recongealing the metal using two principal reagents or catalysts.
These reagents reflect the masculine and feminine polarities of existence. “Alchemical
sulfur” represents the masculine, impulsive, and red pole, while “quicksilver”
or “alchemical mercury” represents the feminine and cool complement.
Together and separately these reagents advance the base metal to gold.

Harry’s two closest friends are Ron Weasley, the redheaded, passionate
boy, and Hermione Granger, the brilliant, cool young woman. They are also living
symbols of alchemical sulfur (Ron) and mercury (Hermione). Together, and more
obviously, in their disagreements and separation, Harry’s friendships
with Ron and Hermione transform him from lead to gold. Sulfur and quicksilver
are frequently called “the quarreling couple,” an apt name for Ron
and Hermione.

The second example is the way the stages of alchemy are illustrated in the
cycle of each book. What has often been described as Harry’s annual hero
journey is in fact the cycle of the alchemical transformation—and each
stage of the work, in case you need a road sign, has a character named for it
in the Harry Potter books. (I am using Lyndy Abraham’s Dictionary
of Alchemical Imagery to describe the stages and their traditional imagery.)

The first stage of the alchemical work is dissolution, usually called the
nigredo or the black stage. In this black, initial stage, “the
body of the impure metal, the matter for the Stone, or the old, outmoded state
of being is killed, putrefied, and dissolved into the original substance of
creation, the prima materia, in order that it may be renovated and
reborn in a new form.” Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is named
for this stage of the work.

The second stage is purification, usually called the albedo or white
work. It follows the ablution or washing of the prima materia,
which causes it to turn a brilliant white. “When the matter reaches the
albedo, it has become pure and spotless.” Albus Dumbledore (albus
is Latin for “white, resplendent”) is named for this stage of the
work. Frequently used symbols of the albedo stage of the work in pictorial
representations and descriptions of it are the moon (Luna in Latin),
the name of one of Harry’s friends in the fifth book, and a lily, the
name of his mother, who gave her life to save his.

The third and last stage of the chemical work is recongealing or the perfection,
usually called the rubedo or the red stage. The purified matter is
now

ready to be reunited with the spirit (or the already united spirit and soul).
With the fixation, crystallization or embodiment of the eternal spirit, form
is bestowed upon the pure, but as yet formless matter of the Stone. At this
union, the supreme chemical wedding, the body is resurrected into eternal
life. As the heat of the fire is increased, the divine red tincture flushes
the white stone with its rich, red colour. . . . The reddening
of the white matter is also frequently likened to staining with blood. (my
emphasis)

Rubeus Hagrid (rubeus is Latin for red) is named for this
stage. A common symbol of the red work and the Philosopher’s Stone is
the red lion.16

Each book thus far is a trip through these stages. The black work or dissolution
is the work done on Harry at Privet Drive by the Dursleys and in the classroom
at Hogwarts by a teacher, Snape, who hates him. The white work or purification
is Harry’s year at Hogwarts under the watchful eye of the white alchemist,
Albus Dumbledore, in combination with painful separation from Ron, Hermione,
or both. The red work or rubedo is the climactic crucible scene, so
far always underground or in a graveyard, in which Harry always dies a figurative
death and is saved by love in the presence of a Christological symbol.

The resurrection at story’s end each year is the culmination of that
year’s cycle and transformation. The cycle then closes with congratulations
and explanations from the master alchemist and a return to the Dursleys for
another trip through the cycle.17

The third example is the way alchemy explains the structure and bizarre events
of the latest book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. From
its hot and dry beginnings in Harry’s sojourn in the House of Black to
his time at Hogwarts under the police state of Dolores Umbridge (a fascinating
cryptonym, which may mean “grieving resentment,” “grievous
shadow,” or “a woman who blocks the sun”) to the death of
his godfather at the end, Order of the Phoenix is the nigredo
volume of the series.

Harry is burnt up, broken down or dissolved, and bled until everything that
he thought he was—star Quidditch player, his best friend’s superior,
pet of the headmaster, lover of his school, son and spitting image of a great
man, victim of the Dursleys, valiant enemy of Snape, even his being the hero
and man of action in time of crisis—is taken from him or revealed as falsehood.
The boundaries of his world collapse; magical enemies come to his home with
the Dursleys, and Aunt Petunia knows about them. The Dursleys’ house is
no longer a sanctuary, however miserable, and Hogwarts is no longer edifying
or any joy to him.

The world is no longer separated into good guys and bad guys. Harry has been
reduced to his formless elements. Whether the white stage is to follow this
black novel, however, and a climax to follow in the seventh and final book turning
on Hagrid the Red, Order of the Phoenix is Rowling’s nigredo
volume.

Imagery & Symbolism

I hope this description of the design of the books will suffice at least as
an argument, if not a demonstration or proof (which is hardly possible short
of Rowling’s confession) that the Harry Potter books are built
on an alchemical formula or structure. What do the books’ imagery and
symbolism tell us? Here are three quick examples: the alchemical images in Goblet
of Fire and Order of the Phoenix and the use of doppelgangers
in all the books.

First, the alchemical images in the fourth book, Goblet of Fire.
Harry’s preparation for each trial in the Tri-Wizard Tournament by fire,
water, or labyrinth are each from the alchemical work. Dragons symbolize matter
at the beginning of the work being resolved into philosophical sulfur and mercury.
The bath is “the secret, inner, invisible fire that dissolves and kills,
cleanses and resurrects the matter of the Stone in the vessel,” while
immersion in water and floods symbolizes “the dissolution and putrefaction
of the matter of the Stone during the black nigredo stage.”18

In his “dangerous journey” through the labyrinth, a symbol of
the alchemical work, “illusion and confusion reign and the alchemist is
in danger of losing all connection and clarity.” The climactic confrontation
with Voldemort happens in a graveyard, and the grave is “the alchemist’s
vessel during the nigredo.” All the alchemical images of Harry’s
four Tri-Wizard tasks are preparatory for the black stage or nigredo of the
great work, to come in Order of the Phoenix.

In Order of the Phoenix, Harry has been undone by his experiences:
He knows his parents aren’t gods; he can’t play quidditch; his lack
of self-awareness and his resentment and self-pity cause his godfather’s
death; he can’t act at will; he can’t get information; his mentor
Dumbledore is strangely absent; the world hates him; he suffers privately for
the truth (“I will not tell lies”); and his friends are honored
before him. This dissolution, though, is not his purification, and so we are
left at book’s end with only the formless dregs of Harry’s character,
which, frankly, are not pretty.

There are other alchemical symbols in Order of the Phoenix as well—the
black king, for example. Kingsley Shacklebolt is not a token black character
but an alchemical reference to the “black king.” The king of the
alchemical work must die, usually by drowning, and “at this stage the
matter is at its blackest black and is known as the black king.”19

His new friend Luna is another alchemical symbol. “Luna is the bride,
the white queen, consort of King Sol. She is the moist, cold, receptive principle
which must be united with Sol, the dry, hot, active principle in the chemical
wedding.” A girlfriend for the hot and dry—burned to a cinder—Harry?
Luna “symbolizes the attainment of the perfect white stage, the albedo,
where the matter of the Stone reaches absolute purity.”20 (Look
for Harry and Luna to be a couple in the sixth book—much to Hermione’s
and Professor McGonagall’s disgust.)

One of the weirder images of Order of the Phoenix is the heads of
dead house elves lining the stairway at the House of Black (“house,”
by the way, is alchemical language for alembic or vessel). I first thought Rowling
was pointing graphically to the sufferings of house elves (which leads to horrible
consequences for everyone). She may well be doing so, but “head of the
dead” is also a symbol for “the initial stage of the opus, the black
nigredo.”21 How appropriate for wall hangings in the House of
Black!

Harry’s parents, James Potter and Lily Evans, at last become three-dimensional
in Order of the Phoenix, and we get to see the reason, or at least
one reason, why Snape hates Harry so much. Harry gets to watch his 15-year-old
father, of whom he is almost a mirror image, and learns that his dad was a conceited
bully whom his mother at that age despised. “Lily” is synonymous
in the alchemical work with “Luna.”22 No doubt we will
learn in the next books how James was tried in the fire to win the lily that
reflects the achievement of the second stage of the work.

And how about the sacrificial bird in the title of this book, the loyal hero?
The phoenix is an alchemical “symbol of renewal and resurrection signifying
the philosopher’s stone, especially the red stone attained at the rubedo,
capable of transmuting base metals into pure gold.”23

There are many more alchemical images. A quick run through one alchemical
imagery dictionary threw light on all the following subjects and symbols featured
in the Potter series, each of which has an alchemical meaning that
deepens Rowling’s decision to use them in her story: bee (Dumbledore),
blood, bolthead, castle, cervus fugitivus (stag), raven (raven’s head),
cupid, eagle, griffin, lazy Henry (Harry), house, melancholia, metamorphosis,
night, orphan, red man and white woman (Ron and Hermione), king, serpent, ship,
Sol, skeleton, sulphur, quicksilver, tears, toad, unicorn, wolf, and worm.

Doppelgangers

The third example of alchemical imagery in the books is Rowling’s frequent
use of doppelgangers. A doppelganger is a creature’s complementary figure
or shadow, which reveals aspects of its character otherwise invisible. Think
of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein
and his monster.

Many of Rowling’s characters are “animagi,” who can change
into an animal shape (James, Sirius, Peter, Minerva, Rita—and I’ll
add Dumbledore, who I bet is the tawny owl that appears in several places).
Nymphadora Tonks is a “metamorphmagus” or shape-changer. Others
characters are “half-breeds” or children of non-magical parents
(Hagrid, Olympe, Fleur, Lily, Tom Riddle, Hermione, Remus, Tonks, and Snape,
assuming he is a vampire). Harry, because he grew up as a Muggle, has an honorary
membership here.

The books also include several “threshold characters,” whom scholars
call “liminal” (Snape, Dobby the house elf, Firenze, Hagrid, Remus,
Peter, Neville, the squibs Argus and Arabella, Mundungus, and Percy, who seems
to have crossed the threshold in Phoenix). These live in two worlds
or so far to the periphery of their own world that they cannot fit into the
usual categories (good guy or bad guy, insider or outsider, for instance).

Many twins, pairs, and brothers appear in the books as well (George and Fred,
the Weasley troop, Hagrid and Grawp, Sirius and James, Ron and Hermione, Slytherine
and Gryffindor, Lily and Petunia, Peter and Neville, as a cross-generational
pair of look-alikes, and Harry and Neville, who are joined by the prophecy).24
Double-natured creatures include centaurs, griffins, hippogriffs, and the sphinx,
with a special mention due to the phoenix, thestral, and unicorn, because they
are not what they seem, namely, bird or horse or even bird/horse/dragon.

And finally, the books hinge on the relation of Harry and Voldemort. Order
of the Phoenix begins with three mentions of Harry’s feeling that
his skull has been split in two, and one has to imagine it must crack right
down that jagged scar. It turns out that Harry’s head really is divided
and he has an unwelcome guest. He isn’t carrying a passenger like Quirrell,
nor is he possessed as was Ginny but Harry has a double nature or shadow in
his link to Voldemort—and his inability to turn inward and confront this
shadow is the cause of the tragedy at the book’s end. Like his dad at
fifteen, he was willingly blind to the “back of his front.”

This pairing or unity in division is a central theme of the Harry Potter
books, and it has an alchemical meaning. The activity of alchemy is the chemical
marriage of the imbalanced “arguing couple” of masculine sulfur
and feminine quicksilver. These antipodal qualities have to be reconciled and
resolved, “die” and be “reborn,” after conjunction before
recongealing in a perfected golden unity.

Certainly, the similarity of this language to the Christian spiritual path
is remarkable—and understandably so, because the symbols of the completion
of the alchemical work are also traditional ciphers for Christ, the God/Man,
in whose sinless two natures Christians are called to perfection in his Mystical
Body, the Church. Dumbledore uses the language of Chalcedon in Order of
the Phoenix (chapter 21), in fact, to distinguish the two natures and essence
of Harry and Voldemort.

But the old and the new man cannot live together in the same person or world—and
this is Harry’s war with his doppelganger or twin-in-spirit, Lord Voldemort.
Love has overcome death in each of the books’ endings thus far; I expect
this will be the series’ end as well.

Themes

I discussed four principal themes in The Hidden Key to Harry Potter: prejudice,
death, choice, and change. How do these themes appear in the light of alchemy?
I think Rowling’s meaning crystallizes around the alchemical perspective
of these ideas.

Every Harry Potter book is a rewrite of “pride and prejudice.”
These vices are the defining qualities of those characters who despise the double-natured
creatures about them and who are blind to the leaden soul or “old man”
within themselves. Rowling’s signature surprise endings, in which the
good guy is revealed to be a bad one and vice versa, alongside her hateful renderings
of the prejudiced, are meant to awaken in us some awareness of our own pride,
prejudice, and need for purification.

Death is a necessary part of the alchemical work; only in the death of one thing,
from the alchemical perspective, is the greater thing born. (Alchemists frequently
cited John 12:24 and Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection.25) But Love,
the action of contraries and their resolution, transcends death. Love brings
life out of death, even eternal life and spiritual perfection. This is a direct
match with Rowling’s message about how to understand death and love.

Harry’s changes have always come as consequences of his heroic choices;
Dumbledore has never failed to say in his farewell talks that it is one’s
choices that determine who you will be, not your birthright (if you have any).
But the complement of choice or free will is fate and destiny—and this
complement to choice appears in Order of the Phoenix via the prophecy
of which Harry (or Neville) is the fulfillment.

Rowling is resolving the traditional problem of fate and free will alchemically;
Harry has a destiny (it seems) in this prophecy as, I think, the heir of Gryffindor,
but he will only fulfill this destiny by making right choices. This again echoes
the Christian/alchemical message that we are created as images of God, but in
order to become his likeness, we must die to the old, fallen man in us, and
choose rightly the means to our perfection.

Better Explanations?

So we arrive at the last of our three tests of the evidence for or against Rowling
being an alchemical writer in the tradition of the English Greats. Are there
better or just simpler explanations? I can think of only two.

First, the fertility of Rowling’s imagination. This is the simplest alternative,
that Rowling’s use of alchemical imagery is either a coincidence or a
case of artists in different places and times being inspired by the same playful
muse. This explanation suggests that her art is somehow “accidental,”
which is not plausible, given the obvious extent of her knowledge of alchemical
imagery and her skillful use of it in her books.

Second, the imaginative compost of her reading. Rowling has said in several
interviews that her books’ inspirations are drawn from the compost in
her mind of all the books she has read. She did not say, however, that her inspiration
went without careful sifting and plotting (some seven years before the first
book was written). Her characters, plots, themes, and imagery were not items
that she picked from the top of her imaginative pile without discernment.

I do not think there is a simpler or better explanation for the preponderance
of alchemical references, themes, structures, images, and symbols in the Harry
Potter books than the common-sense notion that Rowling is writing alchemical
literature. I am not saying alchemy explains everything about Harry Potter,
but I am saying that understanding the use of alchemy in the literary tradition
will help a reader appreciate what Rowling is doing in these books.

As I argued in The Hidden Key to Harry Potter, Rowling, like the
Inklings, is a throwback to the tradition of Greats prior to the twentieth century,
who wrote edifying Christian entertainments and literature. These writers used
alchemical imagery because it so powerfully presents Christian truths for readers
and helps them experience them imaginatively, as a prelude to experiencing them
liturgically.

Why are these books so popular? What need do they fill? What longing do they
satisfy? No other series that I know of, with the possible exception of Dickens’s
serials, has ever created such a huge and diverse readership. Does the author’s
use of alchemy help explain why the books are so popular?

At least in part. Rowling clearly understands both “alchemy in literature”
and the “alchemy of literature.” Her books satisfy the need in us,
born in a profane culture without heroes or avenues of transcendent experience—a
materialist world in which such experience is not considered possible by “serious
people”—of at least an imaginative experience of human transformation
and perfection. We get this experience in our identification with Harry, and
we are better, more human even, for having been at least for a while in the
alembic vessel, changing from spiritual lead to gold, dying and rising from
the dead. In brief, Rowling’s novels are so popular because her works
transform the human person via imaginative identification, katharsis,
and resurrection.

The great irony in the objections that Rowling’s books undermine or violate
the tenets of the Christian faith is that her books offer initiation, not into
the occult, but into the symbolist worldview of revealed faiths (and sacramental
religions specifically) and the dominant symbols and doctrines of traditional
Christianity. Ignorance of alchemy and the larger traditions of English literature—not
to mention the Christian understanding of the relations of faith and secular
culture—has caused many to turn away a great help, perhaps providential,
in the trouble and struggle we have to prepare our children for fully human,
which is to say “spiritual,” lives. •

Notes:

1. Secret of Shakespeare (Aquarian Press, 1984).
2. For examples of alchemical symbolism in English literature, see Stanton J.
Linden’s Darke Hieroglyphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from
Chaucer to the Restoration (University of Kentucky Press, 1998).
3. See especially Titus Burckhardt’s discussion of Jung and alchemy
in Alchemy (Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 8–9; and Mirror of
the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art (Quinta Essentia,
1987), pp. 59–66, 132–141.
4. For more on alchemy, see the books quoted in this article, and Lyndy Abraham’s
A Dictionary of AlchemicalImagery (Cambridge University Press,
1998), and her Marvell and Alchemy (Scolar Press, 1990), a first-class
work, albeit restricted to one author. Ask for a sample copy of the journal
Cauda Pavonis from the editor, Prof. Kate Frost at the University of
Texas, or the assistant editor, Roger Rouland.
5. For an introduction to this mind, see C. S. Lewis’s The
Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1964), and the chapter “Imagination
and Thought in the Middle Ages” in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
Literature (Cambridge, 1966).
6. Alchemy, p. 23.
7. Mirror of the Intellect, p. 132.
8. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible (University of Chicago
Press, 1978), pp. 158–160.
9. The Forge and the Crucible, p. 11.
10. Cf. Burckhardt, Alchemy, pp. 8–9.
11. See Jean Paris, “The Alchemistic Theatre,” in Forge,
p. 149, and an illuminating work by a student and friend of C. S. Lewis,
Martin Lings, The Secret of Shakespeare (Aquarian Press, 1984).
12. Lings, Shakespeare.
13. University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. 365.
14. See, for example, “You can lead a fool to a book but you can’t
make them think: Author has frank words for the religious right,” Max
Wyman, Vancouver Sun, November 25, 2001.
15. For St. James, see Alexander Roob, Alchemy and Mysticism (Taschen,
2001), p. 700.
16. Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, op. cit., pp. 5, 135,
174.
17. See chapter 6 of The Hidden Key to Harry Potter and the individual
chapters devoted to each of the first four books. Readers may also consider
the remarkable parallels between Harry’s years at Hogwarts and the first
four days of Johann Andrea’s Alchymical Wedding, a seventeenth-century
work, brought to my attention by William Truderung.
18. Abraham, Dictionary, pp. 17, 59, 78.
19. Ibid., p. 111.
20. Ibid., pp. 119–120.
21. Ibid., p. 31.
22. See above and ibid., pp. 117–118.
23. Ibid., p. 152.
24. As well as Crabbe and Goyle, the Creevey brothers, Lily and Narcissa (flowers
of the same family), and Harry and Dudley.
25. Abraham, Dictionary, p. 28.

John Granger is an Orthodox Reader and the author of several books about Harry Potter, including How Harry Cast His Spell (SaltRiver, 2008) and The Deathly Hallows Lectures (Zossima Press, 2008). His website is HogwartsProfessor.com.

“The Alchemist’s Tale” first appeared in the November 2003 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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